Bergson on the immediate experience of time

Bergson’s influential discussion of durée—the concept at the heart of his dynamic view of time’s reality—emerges from an inquiry into the nature of temporal experience. In this chapter, I outline Bergson’s view of the non-inferential or immediate experience of time, and mark out the place of durée within his account. I underscore the relation between Bergson’s controversial argument concerning number and his view of temporal experience, and contrast Bergson’s notion of ‘immediate experience’ with immediacy as typically understood in contemporary thought. Bergson’s view of the experience of time, I suggest, is a dual-aspect theory in which durée is accorded a fundamental role in relation to the temporal properties of succession, intervals, and simultaneity.